Storm was wild, but not that wild

The storms were wild, but not too wintry, said those who had to cope professionally with the deluges over the weekend.

Dana M. Nichols

The storms were wild, but not too wintry, said those who had to cope professionally with the deluges over the weekend.

"It's amazing to watch. It is kind of like being in a tropical rainstorm," Gordon MacKay, Stockton's interim director of Public Works, said of the downpour that briefly overwhelmed storm drains and flooded a number of city streets on Sunday morning.

"We had so much rain in a short period of time there was a period where the system was in what we call surcharge, which basically meant the pipes were full," said MacKay. "Once the rain stopped, then the water started to drain away."

MacKay's department dispatches various city crews, including the municipal utility workers who clear storm drains.

The storms were also fairly warm, almost too warm for ski resorts whose staff watched Friday through Sunday as the falling moisture turned from snow to rain and back to snow again.

"It was too warm of a storm. There definitely were moments when it was raining right here at the ski area," said Rosie Sundell, marketing director at Bear Valley Mountain ski resort on Highway 4.

In the end, however, the temperature dropped Sunday night, leaving the upper mountain with significant new snow and a base depth of about three feet, Sundell said.

In Calaveras County, crews responded to 30 reports of flooding and evacuated one resident of a flooded apartment building, said Sgt. Chris Hewitt of the Calaveras County Sheriff's Office. There were also nine blocked roads, four downed trees, and five incidents in which electrical problems caused calls to the county 911 center that were not dialed by humans, Hewitt said.

In Stockton, city crews handled more than 400 calls for storm-related problems Friday through Sunday, including 38 cases of fallen limbs or trees, MacKay said.

The storms did some good for Stockton by dumping 9,000 acre feet of water into New Hogan Reservoir. An acre foot is about enough water to supply two urban homes for a year. Hogan, on the Calaveras River, is a major water source for Stockton.

At one point on Sunday, water was flowing into Hogan from upstream tributaries at a rate of more than 8,500 cubic feet a second, according to data posted online by the California Department of Water Resources.

Yosemite National Park announced Monday that the storms had prompted authorities there to close Tioga Road and Glacier Point Road for the season. The storms left 5 1/2 feet of snow in Tuolumne Meadows, park officials said.

Although Sunday's 1.23-inch total rainfall in Stockton was a record, the three-day storm series taken as a whole wasn't. According to National Weather Service data, the three-day rain total of 2.83 inches in Stockton for Friday through Sunday was the most since Feb. 16-18, 1986, when 3.25 inches fell here.